Stacks ecosystem graphic (request for ideas)

[jennymith]

Tagging @ryanarndtcm and @HaroldDavis3 for links to their ideas.

Everyone else please feel free to share your ideas as well!

[ryanarndtcm]

For me, I think it needs to organize from the inside out with healthy individuals (identity and privacy) connected in small groups (neighbours/famillies) connected in larger groups (communities) to larger (cities countries etc). The Stacks Ecosystem could have versions of each of these

i think healthy and sustainable will likely be some way of organizing that will work on each of these levels - like a master algorithm that applies on all levels and could then be applied to support healthy and sustainable online relationships that honors the data, the people, the communities etc all the way up.

I think nature (having had so much time to try out different things) is a great place to look for inspiration around this. Forests can be diverse and self-organizing.

This video really got me thinking about using natural systems as models for organizing the Stacks Ecosystem, and was the one of the main reasons I decided I wanted my job title to be Stacks Ecosystem Steward - ie someone who can help to encourage others to have stewardship of our shared ecosystem.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Oy9LyVThlg

[HaroldDavis3]

This is the paper referenced thursday. And to your points @ryanarndtcm the following from this Satoyama paper stuck out as relevant here & inspired the quick visuals of our ecosystem flows from my personal vantage point--

Lansing’s analysis of Balinese rice irrigation (Lansing 2007) provides another case where voluntary associations provide egalitarian self-organization. In Bali, rice is farmed on the terraced slopes of dormant volcanoes. Rice is a water-intensive crop, and it was assumed for centuries — first by Dutch colonists and later by anthropologists—that the structural hierarchy of irrigation canals, running top-down along the slope, determined a corresponding sociopolitical hierarchy of water management. Because the volcanic craters are filled with fresh water, greater social power was thought to reside higher up the slope, with Brahmin priests of the many “water temples” lording over the system, determining irrigation schedules by fiat. However, Lansing found that the schedules were created by the farmers in a self-organizing, egalitarian decision-making process. What makes this possible is linked negative and positive feedback between uphill and downhill farmers. Uphill farmers fear pest explosions: if rice irrigation is not synchronized, pests will not be drowned. Downhill farmers fear drought.

Because of this mutually assured destruction, each season the farmers come together within the water temples, throw off class and caste distinction, and work out a schedule without relying on a centralized authority. The water temples house the Deity of the Weir, which requires offerings from farmers who benefit from water flowing through it. Farmers come and go, but the social unit defined by weir waters persists. The spiritual connotations ensure that cooperation does not feel like it is putting you at risk of becoming a dupe in an iterated prisoner’s dilemma: each person’s debt is to the weir deity, not to other people per se.

Similar voluntary associations can be found in open source software, where workers avoid alienated modes of production and regain a sense of artisanal pride in their crafting of code (Benkler 2011). Previously we found an arrangement of linked negative and positive feedback in open source development that paralleled Balinese software production: new code developers carried the threat of forking code to a new project, just as downhill farmers could cause pest explosions (Eglash & Garvey 2014). Older developers tended to have more say in what code gets incorporated, but just as uphill farmers dare not cause droughts, they cannot arbitrarily cut off access without risking resistance from below. Thus a kind of “powers of the weak” (Janeway 1981, Scott 1985) maintain the voluntaristic, self-organized flow in both the gravitational hierarchy of Bali and the seniority hierarchy of open source.

Satoyama offers an important alternative case for generative justice because its arrangement of uphill versus downhill forces are so muted; practically non-existent. This has important implications because without such “horizontal” cooperation examples, it may appear that generative justice is only achievable in rare or idiosyncratic circumstances.

These pulses include the obvious changes in surface water which accompany rice irrigation, but also pulses in population levels of microbial life, insects, rodents, and other organisms; as well as physical parameters such as local humidity, albedo and fractal dimension of the ecotone edge — the complexity of the transition space between two ecological communities (Kollewe and Spitzer 1995).

The list of these impactful indigenous practices is long; but rice production stands out as one of the strongest. The annual planting of rice maintains wetlands in the form of paddies and irrigation networks, providing home to many aquatic species. Rather than exploitation of a landscape through the alienating extraction of value in the form of vegetative matter, as is the case in typical chemical-based monocrop agribusiness, human activity in satoyama sets the conditions for a sustainable social ecology defined by multispecies flourishing.

Thus, rather than think of satoyama as a one-way flow of biomass, as Kumar and Takeuchi suggest, the generative justice framework illuminates a more comprehensive understanding in which value is circulated — transformed, to be sure, but still returned in unalienated form — through a process in which cultural knowledge, biodiversity stimulus, and other kinds of social and ecological capital are co-generated between human and nonhuman agents. It is easy to mistake this for a one-way flow of biomass from nature to farmers, as these other forms of value are less visible and more elusive. In addition, it is easier to see the circularity in the better-known cases of generative justice — Balinese water irrigation, wherein the flow of water is negotiated between uphill and downhill, or open source software, wherein the inclusion of new code is negotiated between senior and “newbie” developers — because the strong vertical structure makes the coupled feedback loops more apparent. Nevertheless, the more subtle “horizontal" network of relations in satoyama stands out as an important contribution to understanding the wider possibilities for generative justice.

Hopefully it can inspire something for you @jennymith :)

[HaroldDavis3]

@ryanarndtcm This paper seems relevant to ecosystem thinking too! Key to the self-organization & resilience in your forest example is diversity :)

Scholarship utilizing the Generative Justice framework has focused primarily on qualitative data collection and analysis for its insights. This paper introduces a quantitative data measurement, contributory diversity, which can be used to enhance the analysis of ethical dimensions of value production under the Generative Justice lens. It is well known that the identity of contributors—gender, ethnicity, and other categories—is a key issue for social justice in general. Using the example of Open Source Software communities, we note that that typical diversity measures, focusing exclusively on workforce demographics, can fail to fully illuminate issues in value generation.

Using Shannon’s entropy measure, we offer an alternative metric which combines the traditional assessment of demographics with a measure of value generation. This mapping allows for previously unacknowledged contributions to be recognized, and can avoid some of the ways in which exclusionary practices are obscured. We Offer contributory diversity not as the single optimal metric, but rather as a call for others to begin investigating the possibilities for quantitative measurements of the communities and value flows that are studied using the Generative Justice framework.